Congratulations, naive traveler! You have been successfully clickbaited into what will inevitably morph into yet another regrettable decision of your life. You will spend much of your time musing about the possibilities of blogging, weighing each and every abstract illusion of doubt your feeble mind can conjure. It will be a path paved with limitless potential, soul-crushing indecision, and articles promising that you, yes you, are one viral post away from transcendence, because obviously your destiny is entirely in your hands. Your days will be filled with desperation, daydreams, and micro-moments of self-improvement. Every evening, you will be palgued by the wonderful possibility of a slightly improved future while simultaneously convincing yourself that success is a skill you can download like a PDF. Surely centuries of economic inequality’s only cure is self-reliance. You will consume one video after another, read one article after another, all designed to optimize your life, enhance your personal brand, and unlock the true secret of happiness. Each promises the perfect life: a life of infinite energy, infinite followers, and infinite stuff, because of course productivity must be accompanied by material accumulation. And you will sigh as you fall into a restless sleep, hoping against hope that a pile of portfolios, articles, and experience will be bestowed upon you by the marketing gods. A recruiter will suddenly wake up one day and realize that you were the missing piece all along. Congratulations for the second time! You are now trapped in an endless loop, the extraordinary centripetal force of the engagement-optimization algorithm keeping you rooted at the center. Productivity will be the only virtue and consumerism the pinnacle of freedom. Only after a torturously long time of eating roi agencies for breakfast and breathing productivity hacks will you realize the severity of your imprisonment. Neurons firing, adrenaline surging, you type into the search bar: “how to break the loop.” Congratulations for the third time! You have now fallen into the meta loop. After you’ve taken your sweet time to really soak in the misery, and are overwhelmed, frustrated, and teetering on existential collapse, all prerequisites for self-actualization—gilded chains adorning you as you cement another brick in the towering wall of modern slavery. It is in this fragile fragment of digital serendipity that you stumble upon a video. A treasure chest of knowledge opens, revealing the ultimate secret to breaking the loop, which is to… break it. You will dust off your moldy hippocampus, embrace this radical wisdom, and embark once more on the journey of “real change.” Congratulations for the fourth time! You will now realize that your life is an unreasonably voluptuous joke. Blogging is dead, AI is going to take over the world, and hustle culture, that relentless gospel, demands that you grind harder, monetize your misery, and optimize yourself into oblivion. You will revel in the bleakness of a future that isn’t here yet but will be, so you might as well get in some early mega-existential-depression practice, because you’re productive like that. Until one fateful day, by sheer act of accidental motivation, you find a stained, crumpled page. And with an ancient ballpoint, you pen your first article. But fret not: you will not be becoming super productive anytime soon. It may well be the only article you write for the remainder of your miserable life, but that’s okay; the journey was the content, and the content is the journey. So here you go: my first “article,” and for the good of all humanity, possibly my last.